I was friends with this kid and I will associate Three Words with him instead!
https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-b...
Why Bother with What Three Words?
231–240 of 336 posts
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#232The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…
Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…
Wouldn't it be a lot better to do the following:
* Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them.
* Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address
In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!)
(maybe even for different kinds of data-packets)
* Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT
you first have to authenticate as a legal entity
(person or registered organization / business)
that authentication data is hard coded on to the envelope.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#233So this is a worse implementation of the German Navel Grid System, taken a few layers deeper, and without the contextual value of an actual grid?
Looks like Lat/Long win again.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#234The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…
This actually has a usage for emergency services. People call and don't know where they are. This app can let the operator send them a text with a link in that they follow and can communicate very effectively the precise location. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912
Every internet capable device has GPS, iploc, or both. This is just adding an extra step to the process that requires a bunch of button pushes and lip flapping.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#235W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…
Your first four points basically describe lat/lon. But it is hard for humans to parse long characters/numbers. And it's even more difficult to speak random characters. E.g. "B" "b" "be" "bee" are all spoken the same. That's why we use something like the NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is actually a form of "foot in the door" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique . If you see a high pricing on their webpage you might go away immediately. But if you make the effort to calling them, you are already committing yourself and you are more likely to accept a higher price than you would have if it was easily accessible.
Not a marketing person, but there also has to be value in the lowest possible bar to begin participating, and then a higher one later to increase engagement with public price menus. "Call now for sales pitch" is not that: it means secret deals and whatever they can haggle out of you. Look, even this dinosaur got it right: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/api-manage...
TBH though:
- You are WAY underestimating modern Microsoft, they may be a dinosaur in that they are a relatively old company but they are definitely still one of the bigger predators around.
- Not every business has the same target audience. Some companies desire "everyone" and will make the barrier as low as possible; some companies will purposely target only those customers with the money and commitment to call a sales team and will not make the effort to support customers who are not worth the attention.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very…
Wouldn't it be a lot better to do the following: * Realize that things like 'SSN's are being used as social identifiers and actually just issue them. * Allow legal entities to authenticate and update their preferred physical address In ONE place (so I NEVER have to update billing addresses again!) (maybe even for different kinds of data-packets) * Make it possible to mail to someone's identity (as the address), BUT y…
I wish we would make it possible in the US to use an email address as an address for purposes of things like having a bank account and pick up things like debit cards in person from any branch of that bank if you are traveling, homeless, whatever.
I rarely get any important physical mail these days. But I still run into issues over address problems (ironically, more now that I am back in housing than I ever did while homeless: https://writepay.blogspot.com/2019/02/mailing-address-drama....).
My life is mostly online. I was a military wife for a lot of years and moved around a lot. Lots of people have very physically mobile lives these days.
Yet, we haven't adapted our systems to this reality. We want to tie everyone to a physical address for a long list of things, as if we are plants who can't move from this one location or something.
I don't know what the answer is, but, wow, I sure wish we would come up with better answers than acting like this is still the 1950s and everyone will work for the same company and live in the same house for decades and we can each be found in some particular location all the time.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The non-proximity of W3W locations with similar identifiers is intentional; it's meant as an easy way to perform error checking. The concept is that you state your location, and if you state it wrong, or the other person gets it wrong, the mistake will be obvious because the small change to the identifier results in a location extremely distant from you. The system pretty explicitly considers all squares equal, witho…
OK, I see that. But (and maybe I'm just too cynical) the huge benefit for W3W is that it's much harder to reverse engineer the identifier-assignment code. So only W3W can generate valid identifiers.
The data files you need to store are fairly small. The bigger problem is people who have done their own imple tstion got threatening legal letters.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#239The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…
This is why you have space filling curves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_curve
With that you can have a linear ordering of space at each scale. Rounding errors become rounding errors. I remember seeing an implementation of that on npm or some such thing.
Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?
#240The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they shou…
"If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period..." I think it is interesting that you say that, because I see this system as DNS system on top of IP. So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name. Which begs the question: would a better system involve letting people pay to register names that point to latlongs…
> So latlong is your IP, and W3W is your human-readable domain name.
No, it's not. It's actually more like the opposite. The domain name system is hierarchical, and W3W is clearly (and I gather, intentionally) not.
IP addresses are also hierarchical, but the mapping of domain names to them is only somewhat systematic.
Really, though, W3W identifiers are most like Tor onion names. Just hashes. Indeed, some have suggested replacing alphanumeric onion names with something like W3W.